Category Archives: relationships

In the week since my last post: My father spent 5 days in the hospital following emergency surgery. My brother sustained a mild concussion. My in laws spent their second week out of their home in the wake of superstorm Sandy. First one, then the other of my dogs hurt a leg. My great aunt… Continue Reading

How do you talk to yourself? And I don’t mean the funny or meaningless chatter as you go about your day, thinking of things you need to do or what you thought about those pictures on the internet of cute baby animals or the most recent Ryan Gosling meme. I mean the real self-talk…the kind… Continue Reading

3 Responses to What does your self-talk sound like?

Another variation of this is very real for me this month. Would you say that to a child in your life whom you love? If we can stop and find a better way to say it to someone small, we can do the same for ourselves.

Oh my gosh, that’s an incredibly powerful version. Thank you for sharing! My hope is that by us working on these things, the children in our lives will not have to when they’re adults. Your reminder fits right in with that.

Tracy, it’s beautifully scary how much we are dealing with identical issues and internal changes. Just yesterday I was on the phone with a friend telling her not to be so hard on herself for not being able to influence someone into treating her better. ‘It’s not about you, it’s about her and she has to decide for herself if she’s going to change.’ ‘It’s always so good to talk to you about these things,’ she said, ‘you have such a calm way of looking at these situations.’
‘Well, it’s always easier to help another person from a distance, being in it is much harder. I also need to stop trying to change others.’
And it was when I said those words that I realized I should really be as encourageing and patient towards myself as I was with my friend!

We don’t make changes in a vacuum. Even if you live alone, there are still moments where you have to rely on or wait for someone else’s decision. You wait for the job offer. You wait to see if your application was accepted. You wait to see if the financing will go through. You wait… Continue Reading

A timely post, Tracy. I’ve always considered myself a patient person and one who was able to go with the flow, roll with the tide, and all that. These past two years have tested both qualities to the max. I think I still have some lessons to learn about letting go and knowing what I can control and what I can’t. Thanks for sharing your journey with us! It truly has, and continues to be, a great help to me.

Change is not a neat, precisely measured march from Where You Were to Where You Want To Be. It is a wild and messy ballet, full of spastic leaps in directions that make no sense at the time, tiny hops, spins that go on for dizzying lengths of time. Change is the single branch… Continue Reading

This is my dog, Stray. She’s very sweet. She’s also needy. Only one of those things is meant as a compliment. She plops her big furry head right in my lap…never mind that she just mushed my hand onto the delete button of my laptop. She sometimes follows me to the bathroom and whines softly… Continue Reading

2 Responses to Some advice from my dog

So I will try not to write a book, although when you get me started dogs…well, anything can happen.

Stray is so beautiful! I think all dogs are beautiful. If I were really really honest with myself I really ought to be working with dogs because I LOVE LOVE LOVE all dogs. So it makes total sense to me that you would recommend following their lead.

Regarding needy dogs: I have known some. I had an extended visitor whom we dubbed the Needy Nutria. (A nutria is a large rodent.) He would levitate into your lap before you even knew what happened.

We now babysit another dog who is could be even needier. I found this dog near my house and we have since become friends with the owner (once they got reunited).

We just lost our dog last week. Nikki, actually, was not at all needy. Yes, she needed us to provide food and lodging, but she was incredibly independent – to the extent that she would sometimes escape just because she liked to go out on her own! I really would have liked a little more neediness. Fewer escapes, more doggy lap time, but she was too independent for that. If you were really lucky, she would sit close to you.

Thanks so much for sharing Nikki’s memorial, Dee. She was absolutely beautiful.

I’m a total dog person too. Stray is not very well right now, in that vague sort of old dog way, so it’s probably extra good that I’ve made my peace with what I was calling her neediness. (It was pretty enlightening to go all the way through that thought process, actually. More in another post.)

And lastly, thanks for the heads up on the MailChimp thing. Always appreciate another eye on things!